Park life: Dell announce XPS One 27, XPS Duo 12 and XPS 10

By Geoff Bowen, August 30, 2012

Not long after breakfast this morning, we headed to Dell’s ‘TechnologyPark’ in IFA to discover what announcements they had in store. Having found all the deck chairs occupied and not much space available on the ‘grass’ – we propped ourselves up next to a couple of neglected Vostro desktops.

After a brief introduction by Dell EMEA President Aongus Hegarty, the job of unveiling the latest XPS products fell to Sam Burd, the firm’s Global VP of Personal Computing. The first revelation of the morning was that the “XPS comes in S, M, L… and now XL” – which referred to the launch of the XPS One 27 – a large all-in-one (AIO) PC with a large 27-inch wide quad-HD touchscreen display. It also comes with Infinity Premium speakers and Waves MaxxAudio 4 audio technology.

Next up, under the headline of ‘convertibles have always been more fun’ (presumably not said by someone who lived through this year’s rainy summer), was the XPS Duo 12, a tablet-cum-notebook complete with a full HD touchscreen which rotates on a flip-hinge to swap between the two modes – pretty similar to the Inspiron Duo which won a design & engineering award back at CES 2011. The Duo 12 is made from premium materials including machined aluminium and carbon fibre, as well as Corning Gorilla glass for durability.

The final announcement was the XPS 10 – which on first impressions appeared to be a 10-inch version of the company’s existing XPS laptop range. That was until, in a slightly corny way, Aongus jumped back on to the stage to reveal that it was in fact a laptop/tablet combo (a laptab? or laplet?). The ARM-processor based XPS 10 will use the Windows RT operating system.

All of these three new XPS products will be made available for sale following the launch of Windows 8 and therefore are expected towards the end of October. Pricing has not been released at this stage.